Victim of Gadgetry – Sony Reader PRS-500

I am a book junky. I order books from Amazon.com every week and these books have piled up in my shelves and I am running out of room. I have been waiting for some electronic gadget that would take care of my problem. I read almost a year ago about this new gadget called Sony Reader PRS-500 and thought for myself that it might be something to go with. This weekend, I finally saw it in a local store and fell in love. I bought it with all of the accessories I could get, came home and was happy of my new thing. I had not read any of the reviews such as Pcmag.com or any others and I have to say that nobody believes that it is going to survive. Sony does not have a good reputation in the last few years to deliver things and their DRM policies have scared away lots of people.

This is how the site works…. You install their client software that acts as an Internet browser. The software STINKS, it does not even have search capability, the books that they provide is limited…. I also really messed up with the $50 credit that they give…. The box included a paper with the notion of $50 credit; I assumed that when I order books, it will automatically deduct it from the bill. Guess what… it did not and in fact I tried to send emails to their support and I have reminded them 3 times and I have not heard back in 4 days. Sony has issues, real issues and they will NEVER become successful with this product with this type of crappy software and service.

However, let’s go to the user experience. It really works… so I decided not to take the device back, but to buy books and I have now 22 books in my collection and I have read each evening and it works. I wish there were more books available and I wish the prices were lower specifically as they are not even less than Amazon.com that delivers it in physical format to your door. If it were not to the fact that I can now carry tens of books with me all the time, I would have let Sony have it back due to the lack of respect for clients like myself that buy these things before the mainstream does. I tried to figure out from Sony web-site how to send comments about their support.. guess what… they do not provide that… I always ended up with the same link that does not answer. Sony has had issues with their market entries, they are late with their music download service, they have DRM policies that nobody likes so I think that this gadget will not go mainstream anytime soon but I hope they will extend the book selection so people like me have not spent close to $500 for nothing.